Genocide museum captures brutality of the Khmer Rouge

Looking terror in the face

SAN ANGELO, Texas - As if the world were shocked into silence, the traffic noise emanating from Phnom Penh's busy streets fades away within the precincts of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The compound of three-story buildings is surrounded by a stone wall topped with razor wire, and inside visitors come to know the meaning of horror.

Even Toro Vaun's lively and upbeat nature was suppressed by the story told in the museum exhibits, which illustrate Cambodia's grimmest years.

In April 1975, what once was a small guerrilla group in northeast Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, captured the capital city Phnom Penh and evacuated the city's 2.5 million residents into work camps in the countryside.

Vaun, the 10th of 11 children, was born in 1977 at the height of the power of the Khmer Rouge.

"Basically, the new regime claimed the country was back to Year 0," Vaun said. "It didn't matter if you were a shop owner, teacher, janitor or construction worker, you were forced into manual labor in the countryside."

The idea was to convert Cambodia, which had been renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, into an idealist agrarian society free of modern institutions.

But the Khmer Rouge believed it wasn't enough just to rid the country of these institutions — the people who had run the institutions also had to be eliminated. Educated people, business owners and religious leaders were executed by the thousands.

The compound that is now the museum once was Security Prison 21, or S-21, one of the many sites around the country where the lives of millions of Cambodians ended under the regime.

In the first building of the museum, Vaun and his family looked in silence into the rooms, each furnished only with an iron bed frame on which lay gasoline cans, shackles and metal rods, the instruments of torture. On the walls of 14 of the rooms were large photographic portraits of the bodies found in the courtyard of the complex in January 1979 when the Khmer Rouge fled.

Occasionally taking photographs in an absent manner, Vaun seemed lost and confused.

"It's almost too disturbing to look at, but you have to look at it, you have to remember," he said.

Past a gallows and two large drowning cisterns, the next building when in active use had housed more detainees, who were shackled to the wall. Metal fencing and barbed wire covered the open-air walkways of the upper floors.

"The prison personnel put up the wire to keep detainees from committing suicide," Vaun said.

He paused at the entrance to the next building as if preparing himself for the emotions he was going to have to confront. He wiped his eyes free of the tears and cautiously made his way inside. On display were thousands of photographs — mug shots — of the prisoners once kept within these walls, each with an identification number like those of common criminals.

"It's as if their eyes are alive and staring back at you, and you can see how terrified they are," Vaun said. "These photos were taken before they were tortured or executed.

"I feel, even now, the agony and fear of these people who knew they were going to die."

Room after room, images of the faces of men, women and children by the thousands line the walls, finally ending in a room with glass cases filled with human skulls.

"The evidence of the brutality is here," Vaun said. "This is the evidence of just a very small portion of the Cambodian genocide."

The skulls bear the marks of the manner of death: dime-size holes made by bullets, big, irregular cavities made by clubs or truncheons.

A light fog of incense floats in the room from a small Buddhist shrine set up to honor the dead. Vaun bowed his head at the shrine before stepping back outside.

For many Cambodians the site is an open wound, a deep and bloody gash in the history of the country. For Vaun, it was not only a place of unspeakable horror but also a piece of an unfamiliar past filled with vaguely defined memories.

"My memories of my birth village are pretty vague," Vaun said. "I only lived there for the first four years of my life, but I do remember certain locations of trees I would climb, and of the lake near our home where my friends and I would swim."

With no electricity or running water, it was not a luxurious childhood but still one that was carefree and without deprivation.

Little did Vaun know that the elders of his small community and elsewhere were having to make life and death decisions as the Khmer Rouge overran the country, moving people like game pieces, changing lives, killing millions.